Google Pours "Incredible" Computing Power into Antibody Drug Discovery With Adimab
Summary
“The infrastructure alone is in the millions of dollars of raw computational power.” Gerngross won’t say exactly how much money and manpower Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is putting into his startup, so it would be easy to dismiss this as chest-thumping from an overzealous biotech entrepreneur who’s just trying to raise cash.He’s the Dartmouth professor who founded GlycoFi to make faster, cheaper antibody drugs in yeast, and sold the company to Merck for $400 million in 2006.His new company, Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, has struck deals in the past year to produce antibody drug candidates for Merck, Roche, Pfizer, and one other unnamed pharmaceutical giant.The market, born in the late 1990s, now generates about $25 billion in annual sales for targeted drugs like Roche’s rituximab (Rituxan) and trastuzumab (Herceptin).Adimab has developed its advantage with a fast yeast-based model that can be used to synthesize hundreds of antibodies against a certain target in just eight weeks of work, compared with six to 18 months of labor with the traditional methods used in biotech labs around the world, Gerngross says.